Chloé Katz performing with her pair-skate partner, Joseph Lynch. (Courtesy: Chloé Katz)
Chloé Katz, the seven-time U.S. National team skater, had performed the triple twist move hundreds of times: Joseph Lynch, her partner of a decade, would launch her six feet into the air, she would spin three times and then land safely in his arms.
But this time, practicing in Canton, Mich., in December 2009, Katz went up crooked. Lynch couldn’t catch her.
Katz hit the ice hard, sending a constellation of pain through her body. Her chance to qualify for a spot at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics was shattered, along with her ankle.
“When you fall on the ice, you don’t have time to cry,” said Katz, a recent alumna of Columbia Business School ‘21. “You have a split second to get up before the music leaves you behind. That’s the only lesson that ever mattered.”
She couldn’t get up that time. Katz’s ankle needed only a hard cast, not surgery. She healed in six months after learning how to function with a boot, but some fractures run deeper than bone.
Chantal Katz, Chloé’s mother, learned about the injury while driving to a friend’s house, and Chloé called her. That’s when she fell apart. Chantal recalled Chloé’s training six days a week, waking at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 6 p.m., while the entire family tiptoed through the house after dark, whispering to not disturb her sleep.
“I was so upset, so upset. If you’re not No. 1, No. 2 doesn’t count,” said Chantal Katz. “You know, in sports, that’s what everyone wants to be forever. I was very upset for her. I was extremely sad. I have to say, I was dead. Of course, I didn’t tell her. It’s like all her dreams falling apart, you know? She had worked so hard. She was so devoted.”
Two years later, Katz and Lynch finished ninth at the 2011 Nationals in Greensboro, North Carolina, three spots below their previous best. Shortly after, they decided to split their partnership.
Katz and Lynch glide across the ice. (Courtesy: Chloé Katz)
In pairs skating, partners need to spin in the same direction with perfect timing and precision. Lynch and Katz were lefties, rotating right, a rare sight in elite skating.
“There are very, very few lefties out there, and in the world, there was like no lefty at my level at this point. So when he wanted to stop, I was forced to stop,” said Katz.
Lynch and Katz still text occasionally for birthdays and holidays, and she insists she’d be there for him in a second if he needed her. Not too long after they retired, she called him upset about an issue at work in her first job out of college, but “he just couldn’t connect anymore,” she said.
The common bond on the ice that had united them for 13 years dissolved.
“We love each other like that, bonds will never go away, but it’s like we can really only relate to the past. We can’t really relate to each other’s lives now,” said Katz.
Both returned to New York University, where they juggled classes and hustled for extra work. After graduation, Katz and Lynch went down different paths; he moved to Michigan while she threw herself into building a new career in New York.
The Start of Something New
At 24 years-old, Katz packed up, leaving her pro skating career in Michigan, where many of the finals were, and moved to Manhattan with no work experience, but she had the drive to figure out a plan.
According to a 2018 US Olympic Committee survey, nearly 43% of Olympians who retired from their sport found it challenging to enter the workforce.
“I had no idea at all what I wanted to do because I had never thought about it like my entire life was figure skating and that was the only thing,” said Katz.
Katz felt like she was left to fend for herself and figure out the next move in life.
The retired Olympic alternate became a waitress at McFadden’s, a sports bar that’s now permanently closed. She was told she wasn’t a good fit. Next came a Craigslist job handing out flyers at 5 a.m. before class. Waking up early wasn’t new to Katz.
What began as a hobby, skating once or twice a week starting at age six, escalated after a teacher recognized her talent and recommended that she pursue it seriously.
The same discipline that she needed to wake before dawn and make things happen carried her through predawn shifts before rushing to NYU classes.
Katz applied her competitive instincts to the flyering job. Each flyer had QR codes that tracked conversions, and her numbers convincing people to scan the code earned her a promotion.
She worked at a conference at the Javits Center one day, and found herself at a financial services event. She did what any elite athlete would do: she worked the room. Katz collected 50 business cards and emailed everyone. One interview came through, but no hire. Her NYU internship counselor didn’t see her potential.
“He was actually not supportive at all. He’s like, ‘You don’t know anything about this. You should be a figure skating consultant.’ I remember I left that meeting and I was, like, literally crying,” said Katz.
He did something for her, more than she imagined at the moment. He gave her more business cards, and Katz didn’t give up looking for opportunities.
In 2012, Katz got a response from Morgan Stanley that came with a summer private wealth management internship offer.
“She went out on this limb and gave me this chance when she really didn’t need to,” said Katz. “And she kind of changed my life because there’s no way I would have gone on any interviews had I not had that on my resume.”
With an internship from a leading global financial services firm, ranked number one in global IPOs in 2012, Katz started to teach herself the business despite knowing very little about finance, especially since she studied International Business in undergrad.
“I would go to the gym every morning,” Katz said. “I didn’t have a TV, and I would watch the news, like the financial services news on TV.”
She kept going.
“I would memorize everything I heard, and I was really good at memorizing things, and then I would go to interviews, and just repeat everything I heard, and I didn’t understand a single thing I was saying.”
By the time she sat across from Samir Ghuge for a consultant role in Capital Markets at Virtusa, the dedicated memorization had evolved into tangible progress.
In 2013, Ghuge managed Katz during her first full-time job in fintech since graduating from NYU with a B.S. in international business, and founding the NYU Business Management Society, a diversity recruitment resource group.
“What immediately struck me was that she didn’t approach the process like a candidate. She approached it like a competitor who came to win,” said Ghuge. “She was fully prepared, researched our business, and asked questions that were unusually sharp for someone early in her corporate career.”
Katz’s mindset differentiated her from the competition.
He admired her “competitive empathy,” a rare blend of drive and emotional intelligence. Many candidates talk about solving problems, and Katz actually framed her answers around outcomes, value creation, and real client impact.
Ghuge has hired a variety of backgrounds, including athletes, and he shared how they tend to bring discipline, comfort with pressure, and the ability to handle setbacks quickly.
“In Chloé’s case, those athletic attributes translated directly into her persistence and her refusal to settle for mediocre outcomes,” said Ghuge.
Katz was hungry, curious, and fearless to outwork everyone else.
Katz rose through the ranks at Virtusa and moved to take on a new challenge with AI on the rise, joining an AI startup called Nova IQ as employee number six, then spent five years at FinTech company Backbase, forging partnerships with firms like PwC, Deloitte, and Microsoft, ultimately earning the CEO’s top award for generating the highest new business globally.
In May 2021, Katz graduated from Columbia Business School with an Executive MBA in international finance. She worked full-time throughout and sat on the Columbia Venture Community board.
Today, Katz is director of Aladdin Partnerships at BlackRock, bringing that same grit and refusal to settle as life goes on. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $12.5 trillion in assets under management as of 2025.
A Retired Pro-Athlete Reflects
Traveling the world for competitions felt worth it to Katz because the ice always felt like home, but she now thinks about the tradeoffs: years spent away from family. There was the pushback from her mother and her father, who drove her to every competition after their divorce when she was 10, and her supportive younger sister, Anais, 34, who lives in New York City.
Chantal once feared the financial and social cost of high-level skating, but now sees the full-circle payoff, keeping every bedazzled costume in storage and every videotape from competitions she couldn’t attend while working long hours as an accountant.
“I think that she got rewarded for all of her hard work because Chloé today has a very good job,” said Chantal. “She knows what she wants, and she’s extremely disciplined. That not too many people today have, you know.”
Her competitive spirit never disappeared. It simply found a new arena, shifting from figure-skating to FinTech, with advice for future generations of athletes.
“I would tell any young athlete to cherish it and believe in yourself and give it your all and don’t give up,” Katz said.